With the caveat that these points represent only my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else, I’m pleased to offer some thoughts on how it might be useful to think about the next U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).

Structure and Format 

On the question of whether a detailed review and report should be put together in the traditional fashion, or whether some other format should be used, such as a shorter review and an official speech on the topic, my answer is “yes” – namely, that we should do both things.

I do like the idea of doing a detailed review and publishing a fairly comprehensive (and unclassified) report.  U.S. nuclear weapons policy issues are complex, their nuances are important, and a full-scale NPR provides an unequalled opportunity for each new presidential administration to spell out its approach clearly and as compellingly as possible, not only for the national security bureaucracy that will be needed to implement the “commander’s intent” spelled out in that document, but also for the broader policy community and the general public, from whom sustained buy-in is essential. 

Having a full NPR as a reference document can also be valuable in clearly spelling out U.S. nuclear policies to America’s adversaries, as well as to our allies – so that the former can be deterred, and the latter reassured, by understanding each administration’s commitment to deterrence and responsible national security stewardship as clearly as possible.  A compelling and comprehensive statement of U.S. policy is also important to ensuring ongoing buy-in from Congress and the American people, who need to understand the “why stories” behind our decisions, in terms both of the threats the United States faces and of the reasoning behind the choices American strategy makes in response.

That said, I also like the idea of promulgating policy in a shorter and more digestible form, such as in a presidential speech.  Such a speech, for instance, would give President-elect Trump the chance personally to demonstrate that the policies spelled out in the NPR are America’s national priorities, and not just some document some of the wonkier of his officials crafted in conjunction with career bureaucrats and military officers.  (Because implementing any serious strategy would also entail significant financial burdens and require challenging programmatic trade-offs, such a signal of personal Presidential commitment would be hugely valuable in powering through political and bureaucratic obstacles to effective change.)

President Obama tried something like this with his April 2009 “Prague Speech” on nuclear disarmament, which laid down a clear conceptual very early in his first term, and was thereafter was followed by a much more detailed NPR in 2010.  President Trump could do something analogous by signaling an epochal change of direction in favor of once again building up American strength to ensure we are able to deter our adversaries and reassure our allies in the face of geopolitical threats that have gravely worsened in recent years.  And if President Trump were able to put such a clear messaging statement into the public record soon enough to have it help shape decision-making as Congress prepares for the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and appropriations bills next autumn, so much the better.

(As a point of comparison, national nuclear weapons policy in France takes public form in a relatively rare, usually once-per-administration speech by the French president, which gives him the chance to put his personal stamp on such policies.  This is particularly important in a French political system that is highly centralized around the office of a quasi-imperial president.  Despite our complex U.S. constitutional system’s division of federal governance into separate institutions that share powers, however, American nuclear weapons policy is also highly presidentialized, and it might be very helpful for POTUS to give the world a nuclear-specific speech highlighting key points and thus giving his personal imprimatur to the more detailed reference-document wonkery that will follow in the NPR itself.) 

My suggestion, then?  Take two bites at the apple: (a) put out a shorter, crisp, vision statement at the highest level; and then (b) publish a more traditional NPR built on a much more detailed working-through of programmatic details of how to make that vision a reality.

Issues to Consider

The obvious starting point for the Second Trump Administration’s NPR is presumably the version published in 2018 during the First Trump Administration.  President-elect Trump has a huge advantage here over every other modern president, in that he has already gone through the trouble of articulating a full-fledged nuclear weapons policy  and – in theory, at least – merely needs to update his 2018 NPR in order to keep it fit for purpose. 

As for what adjustments a possible 2025 NPR might perhaps need, it is useful to start by comparing it with the Biden Administration’s NPR published in 2022.  To be fair, there is traditionally a great deal of continuity in U.S. nuclear weapons policy from one administration to the next, and just as I was surprised to find the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR to be much better than I had feared, a good deal of the material in the Biden document is likely to be unobjectionable to the incoming administration, and should be retained.  In a number of respects, however, it might be useful for the next NPR to correct some of the things the Biden team got wrong in their awkward efforts to reconcile performative anti-nuclear virtue-signaling with the realities and imperatives of deterrence in a worsening threat environment. 

So let me offer a sort of issue-spotting list of where the incoming administration might wish to agree with – and perhaps even double down on – what has come before, and where it might be well advised to consider corrective action.

(1)   Recommitting to the Program of Record.

The first point to make – because it is such a foundational one – is to agree with the Biden Administration on the critical importance of completing the longstanding U.S. effort to replace and modernize the “legacy” strategic nuclear delivery systems we have had in service since the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan completed the last recapitalization of America’s nuclear force.  We must fix the bollixed-up programmatics that have led to increasingly worrying delays and cost overruns for some of these programs, of course, but there is a dire need to complete these legacy modernization programs as rapidly as possible, for our current strategic systems are rapidly approaching obsolescence.  This is a truly foundational point for the next NPR, for it we cannot even modernize what we still require but that is today ageing out, then we can hardly expect to be able to meet today’s growing threats with anything new.

And we must modernize and fully recapitalize not merely the delivery systems themselves, but also the U.S. Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) architecture upon which we rely to manage these forces.  Robust, resilient, survivable, and utterly reliable NC3 is absolutely essential to deterrence, as well as to managing things as well as possible if – God forbid – deterrence fails.  Our current NC3 architecture is as old and creaky as our Reagan-era delivery systems, however.  We absolutely must finish modernizing all of these systems.

(2)   Reinvigorating our Nuclear Infrastructure.

Another truly foundational, sine qua non aspect of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, I would say, must be to reiterate the importance of – and then greatly to accelerate – efforts to reinvigorate the American nuclear weapons infrastructure.  We simply must provide the resources needed on a sustained and long-term basis to recapitalize the American nuclear weapons development and production complex.  Being able to respond to security threats by producing more nuclear weapons if needed – and being able to design and validate new weapons if circumstances require – is essential to deterrence. 

As I have noted elsewhere, such “[p]roductive capacity provides a ‘hedge’ against worsening global threats, since if you need more weapons you can make them.”  It also helps prevent an arms race, for it helps encourage adversaries to conclude that that having such a race with you “is not in their interest – and that they should thus sit down and talk.” 

The First Trump Administration understood this, and it worked to increase funding for our weapons infrastructure.  The Biden Administration also increased these budgets, for which it is entirely fair to give them credit.  If you ask me, however, there’s still a lot more to be done, and the next NPR should commit to continuing this trend, and to accelerating it – a lot. 

 We must also radically change the organizational culture of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, imbuing them once more with the kind of vigorous, “‘mission-accomplishment’ psychology that made possible the impressive achievements of their glory years during the Cold War.”  This will also require rather a ruthless look at the internal policies, processes, and procedures that today contribute to routine delays and cost overruns in the nuclear enterprise, reforming or jettisoning those that are not truly essential, and retuning the bureaucratic engine more for scrappy “good enough” performance and endurance than for gold-plated perfection.

Research and development work on new or repurposed nuclear weapons concepts and designs – and ensuring the capacity to produce as many new weapons as might be needed in a worsening threat environment – must be seen as a core mission for NNSA and the laboratories, having a priority equal to maintaining the reliability and security of existing U.S. nuclear weapons.  Today’s rigid, cost-driving, and delay-producing culture of bureaucratic risk aversion there was born of three decades of post-Cold War shrinkage and of anti-nuclear virtue signaling by national politicians, and it must be resolutely abandoned. 

(3)   The Two-Peer Problem.

If you ask me, the third foundational element for the next NPR derives from my comments above about the importance of telling the “why stories” that ground the policy and programmatic choices of nuclear strategy.  This means offering a clear and powerful articulation of the threats we face – and how, and the degree to which, they have been worsening so dramatically – and a compelling articulation of why these particular policy responses to those threats make sense. 

At present, while the last two administrations’ national security guidance documents have been quite effective in spelling out the problems we face from great power competition – including what many are now calling our emergent “two-peer problem” of having to deter aggression by two nuclear-armed great power adversaries at the same time – there is still no clear U.S. Government articulation of the basic contours of how such deterrence challenges can be met.  The 2025 NPR would thus do us all a huge service if it were to provide such crisp general narrative as the conceptual backbone for all the policy and programmatic changes that would follow.

(4)   Uploading Warheads.

One issue that the drafters of the next NPR will have to wrestle with is how to respond to the “Two-Peer Problem” of soon being confronted by two nuclear adversaries, each with an arsenal comparable to our own, both in terms of delivery capabilities and overall scale. This will clearly create a formidable “numbers problem” for our nuclear planners.  As I summarized things last month at a Congressional briefing,

“Nobody has ever before had to deter two hostile nuclear peers at the same time. Our current nuclear force posture sizing was effectively decided in 2010, when our nuclear modernization program began and both Russia and the United States agreed to New START. Under that treaty, Russia’s arsenal was limited to 1,550 operationally deployed warheads, and at the point it was signed China’s arsenal amounted to a modest 200-300 weapons – for a ‘potential adversary’ total of presumably not much more than 1,850 weapons. If you assume the U.S. stockpile was the right size to maintain deterrence then, however, it can hardly be anything but inadequate in 2035, when Russia and China together will have something more like 3,050 warheads, even assuming Russia doesn’t deploy more after New START expires. I’m not arguing that we necessarily need to match them one-for-one – as if that were even possible – but it really can’t be true that our current plans are enough to ensure deterrence in ten years’ time.”

The Biden Administration actually seems to understand this, but they were never actually willing to admit doing so.  Biden officials have conceded that “we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required,” and have told the press that we need to be prepared to expand our arsenal, but they could never muster the courage actually to advocate doing so.  The drafters of the next NPR, however, won’t have the luxury of pussy-footing around the issue for fear of an unkind word from the Arms Control Association – and they surely won’t be inclined to do so.  The next NPR should embrace the opportunity to provide the American people, and the world, with a fierce honesty here.

The next NPR should presumably commit the United States not merely to being ready to upload, but also to a policy of actually doing so to whatever extent is needed to preserve deterrence as Russia builds more strategic systems and expands its current overmatch in theater-range systems, and as China sprints toward parity.   The NPR needn’t take a position on just how many more weapons we should deploy – and it probably shouldn’t do so, not only because the precise number needed will need careful study and might change over time, but also because the details of our posture in this respect should presumably remain classified. 

Nevertheless, it would be useful to stake out the right conceptual ground here.  I dearly wish things were otherwise, but thanks to the growing threats presented by our strategic adversaries, we must be willing to admit that U.S. nuclear policy is now back – more in sorrow than in anger, to be sure, but back nonetheless – in the “build-up” business.

(5)   Theater-class Weapons.

Moreover, in an era in which Russia has been showing China how to use theater nuclear forces for coercive bargaining under the “offensive nuclear umbrella” of a strategic standoff, we also need to do more to mitigate the increasing overmatch in theater-class systems that both Russia and China now enjoy vis-à-vis the United States and our allies.  As I also tried to make clear in my contribution to a recent project on intra-war deterrence challenges at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, I think it clear that we need more flexible and diverse nuclear capabilities to respond to such coercive bargaining at the theater level –  for deterrence, for intra-war escalation management, and in restoration-of-deterrence scenarios.

The new Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear (SLCM-N) announced by the First Trump Administration in the 2018 NPR was an important step in the right direction – as was the lower-yield W76-2 warhead also announced in 2018.  Though Democrats opposed the W76-2 when Trump Administration adopted it, the Biden Administration subsequently tried to use that warhead’s utility in countering regional threats as their excuse to try to kill SLCM-N.  In fact, however, we need both systems – and even that may not be enough.  The next NPR should thus commit to doing more to fix the problem of theater overmatch, not merely through somehow accelerating SLCM-N (though doing so will not be easy), but perhaps also by exploring further options such as a small warhead design that could be retrofitted onto existing or planned long-range precision conventional strike weapons, making them into optionally dual-capable systems and creating  salutary commonalities of interest between (and programmatic opportunities for) the Defense Department’s nuclear weaponry and conventional arms sub-communities.

(6)   Hard-target Kill Capability.

The Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR proudly announced the retirement of the B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb, which up until that point had been the only remaining megaton-class device in the U.S. arsenal.  I don’t deny that the B83-1 was an old, awkward, and near-obsolete weapon, but as the 2022 NPR itself acknowledged, we have no replacement available for the hard-target-kill capability that the aged B83-1 provided. 

Yet so-called Hardened and Deeply-Buried Targets (HDBTs) have been proliferating around the world, particularly in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran – that is, the very countries arguably most likely to become our adversaries in a future conflict.  In conjunction with improved air defenses that make direct overflight more and more difficult, it is becoming both increasingly difficult to kill such HDBTs and increasingly crucial to deterrence that we remain nonetheless able to hold them at risk.  The Biden Administration apparently scrapped the B83-1, however, even beforeexploringhow we could hold such targets at risk in the future, and we presently have an effective alternative neither in hand nor even yet on the horizon. 

This was irresponsible, and I would argue that the next NPR should commit to solving the HDBT problem – which presumably still requires employing nuclear rather than just conventional tools.  I know of at least two concepts for going after such targets with nuclear weapons even apart from the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) concept explored by the George W. Bush Administration before it abandoned that effort, and it is clearly now well past time to evaluate our HDBT options, pick the best one, and start moving out as fast as we can.

(7)   Declaratory Policy.

When it comes to U.S. nuclear declaratory policy, it is probably time to correct the Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR in another way, too: in connection with the so-called “negative security assurances” (NSAs) the United States makes about when it won’t consider using or threatening to use nuclear weaponry.  For some time now, it has been customary for U.S. officials drafting a new NPR to offer an NSA stating that we will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state that is party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and remains compliance with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations. 

This nuclear-specific NSA is not intrinsically problematic, but as you might recall, it was said in the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR that the United States “reserves the right to make any adjustment” necessary in its NSA promise as a result of “the evolution and proliferation of the biological weapons threat.”  That caveat represented a way to engage in a little of what is known as “cross-domain deterrence,” trying to leverage some deterrent effect from the U.S. nuclear arsenal against the potential for catastrophic biological weapons (BW) attack.  (That’s a fancy way of saying that we do not a priori rule out the possibility that if a state mounted a sufficiently horrific BW attack against the United States, we would choose to respond with a nuclear weapon.)

The First Trump Administration very sensibly expanded upon this “reservation of right” caveat by expanding the category of relevant threats to reach any “significant non-nuclear strategic attack” (SNNSA).  Such attacks, the 2018 NPR made clear, 

“include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population orinfrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warningand attack assessment capabilities.” 

The Trump NPR’s NSA language, therefore, 

“reserve[d] the right to make any adjustment in the assurance that may be warranted by the evolution and proliferation of non-nuclear strategic attack technologies and U.S. capabilities to counter that threat.”

All of this made excellent sense.  Indeed, given that such critical infrastructure threats from both China and Russia have been increasing, that U.S. officials now publicly acknowledge that both Russia and North Korea have offensive BW programs, and that Russia is reportedly developing a space-based nuclear weapon system– reportedly to be in some kind of development prototype phase with the satellite “Cosmos 2553” – such a SNNSA caveat would seem to make more sense than ever now. 

Yet, inexplicably, the Biden Administration dropped this SNNSA caveat, and in fact the 2022 NPR contained no such “reservation of right” at all.  This is at least unwarranted, probably foolish, and perhaps even dangerous. 

I understand, of course, that declaratory policy is just policy, and can in theory be changed on a whim.  Yet by ostentatiously dropping the Trump caveat while at the same time pledging to continue to try to “mov[e] toward a sole purpose declaration” that the only purpose of nuclear weapons is to respond to the use of other nuclear weapons – a statement that would by definition preclude a nuclear response to any other form of attack – the Biden Administration sent a terrible signal.  It declared, in effect, that it isn’t as worried about catastrophic BW, critical infrastructure, or space attacks as the prior two administrations had been, and therefore that it wasn’t as concerned as prior administrations had been with trying to deter them.  That feels a bit like inviting disaster.  The next NPR should emphatically rectify the Biden Administration’s foolish unforced error in this regard.

(8)   Nuclear Weapons Testing.

Though as far as I can tell there is presently no need for full-scale U.S. nuclear weapons testing to ensure the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the United States should not hesitate to conduct such testing if such a need arises.  In order to make such testing possible, however, the United States must resume and accelerate its (re-)development of the effective test instrumentation and diagnostic equipment that would be needed in conducting such tests.  This should be made quite clear in the next NPR. 

(Such as step, it should be noted, is important whether or not a high-level political decision were made to test a nuclear weapon for non-technical reasons, such as in order to send a signal of political resolve in the face of adversary threats.  In theory, we could presumably conduct a more or less non-instrumented test quite quickly if the President made the decision to do so, but why not put proper instrumentation on it – to help permit our weapon modelers and weapon designers to learn as much as possible from it – if we can?)   

In the next NPR, the United States may also wish to modify its current “zero-yield” testing policy in order to permit small-scale yield-producing tests akin to those U.S. officials believe Russia and perhaps China to have conducted.  From a technical perspective, there may be useful things to be learned even from extremely small yield-producing tests, but while we ourselves have foregone learning such things for decades, our adversaries apparently have not. 

The issue of Russian and perhaps Chinese testing thus raises the possibility, at least, that the incoming U.S. administration might be willing to relax the U.S. “zero-yield” standard in order to permit small yield-producing American tests at least of the sort that we believe our adversaries to have been conducting.  That might represent a sort of “halfway house” answer, a bit of the way along the road toward resuming testing – adding to our nuclear knowledge, but in ways calibrated to be responsive to adversary activity.

I have no idea whether the Second Trump Administration will be interested in this approach, but given that President Trump’s former national security advisor has publicly called for a return to full-scale nuclear testing – which would be a much bigger deal even than the kind of calibrated small-scale testing I described – one certainly shouldn’t rule this out.

(9)   New Weapons Designs.

For a long time, it was almost an article of almost religious faith on the Democratic Party side of the Washington nuclear weapons policy community that we should never develop any new nuclear weapon.  Congressional Democrats, for example, fiercely resisted multiple efforts by the George W. Bush Administration to explore new weapons such as the RNEP concept and the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), and the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR promised to avoid “the development of new nuclear warheads.”

As you’ll have gathered by now, however, I think this horror at the idea of any kind of “new” nuclear weapon is terribly misguided, especially in the face of current threats.  As I’ve suggested, we may well need one or more new designs – whether this is to handle otherwise unmanageable hard-target kill requirements, to allow us to field a more diverse and flexible theater-class nuclear capabilities, or to accomplish some other critical task. 

Given the huge importance I think we should place upon improving the production throughput of our nuclear weapons infrastructure, moreover, we might also wish to explore new weapon designs that de-prioritize fancy High Cold War performance metrics in favor of minimizing the expense (and maximizing the speed and ease) with which additional nuclear weapons can be produced.  After all, if indeed we do require more weapons in service to deter aggression and need more productive capacity to signal to China and Russia that they can’t win an arms race against us and hence shouldn’t try, we need designs that we can produce quickly and that won’t break the bank if we do.  Let’s figure out what they are.

(10)        “Hedging” Policy.

The Biden Administration also engaged in some rather silly anti-nuclear virtue signaling in how it addressed “hedging” policy.  For years, particularly as we drew down the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal after the end of the Cold War, “hedging” has been an important part of American nuclear policy.  As I have recounted elsewhere, 

“‘Hedging’ phrasing dates back to the first NPR under the Clinton Administration, in which the United States sought to ‘lead and hedge’ – that is, to lead the way toward nuclear disarmament but hedge against unexpected threats along that path by keeping more nuclear capability than was actually needed at any given time, in case things turn out to be more challenging than expected.” 

For many years, this led us to keep a “reserve” stockpile of non-deployed weapons on hand – sort of sitting around gathering dust on a back shelf, if you will – in case our earnest hopes for an ever more benign future didn’t come true and strategic threats increased in ways that would require a somewhat larger arsenal once again.

Despite making exceedingly clear that such threats are indeed now rapidly increasing, however, the Biden Administration’s 2022 NPR declared that “‘[h]edging against an uncertain future’ is no longer a stated role for nuclear weapons.”  The rationale for this change was embarrassingly incoherent even when Biden officials bothered to try to explain it, and to the degree that it meant anything real and could be understood at all, abandoning hedging seems woefully wrongheaded. 

(As best as I can tell, however, this declaration was just a cheap rhetorical dodge.  All it actually said, after all, that hedging was “no longer a stated role” for U.S. nuclear weapons.  Occam’s Razor suggests that the Biden Administration is still doing hedging, but they just don’t want to talk about it anymore and apparently wanted to win anti-nuclear Brownie points for their rhetorical dodge.  To be blunt, that’s just juvenile.)

In fact, some kind of hedging remains very important to the long-term durability of deterrence, and the next NPR should remedy this Biden silliness by admitting that fact.  We need to be able to preserve deterrence if threats worsen, and at any given point in the future, that might require deploying more capability.  Indeed, hedging also helps keep threats from worsening, for maintaining an effective hedge lets the bad guy know that it’s not in his interest to have an arms with you because you’re ready to compete if he tries it.

Accordingly, we need some kind of hedge – and we need to have hedging as a “stated” mission in how we manage our arsenal.  That said, however, hedging may have to evolve.  As noted, our “hedge” has hitherto been the capability to upload more warheads from the U.S. reserve stockpile.  Since we probably need to start uploading at least some warheads in the years ahead in order to meet worsening threats, we will necessarily start to draw down that reserve stockpile.  And because we will still require some kind of hedge capability against future threats thereafter, this means that hedging will have to shift toward more reliance upon the production throughput of our nuclear weapons infrastructure – which brings me back to the foundational nature of my second point above.

Conclusion

As you can tell, I think the drafters of the next Nuclear Posture Review have a lot to do.  I wish them wisdom, courage, speed – as well s lots of political top cover from President Trump and support from the new Congress.

-- Christopher Ford